everybody needs a diy r-dwc!

18 years ago

Here's my Recirculating Deep Water Culture hydroponic garden. It's called "deep water culture" because the roots are constantly completely submerged in water and it's called "recirculating" because water constantly flows through each bucket (as opposed to aerating water in individual unconnected buckets). I spent $150 - 175 on the parts, less than half what one would pay for an equivalent pre-made system.

To emphasize that the system will grow garden-fresh winter produce I chose to "set out" my seedlings on Thanksgiving Day - my culture's harvest celebration.

Rinsing landscape "lava rock". This will support the roots.

Assembled buckets, tubes, pipes and grommets from Home Depot, Menard's and a hydroponic specialty store. Water comes in through 1/4" pipe, exits through a 1" grommet on the opposite side.

The reservoir. A submersible pump pushes water out to buckets, gravity returns water to reservoir.

Air wands from aquarium shop in the reservoir. The water must have a lot of dissolved oxygen in it it or the roots will drown.

Can't have too many bubbles. The more oxygen in the water, the faster nutrients are absorbed through the roots.

Covering the reservoir. If light hits the water algae will grow, wasting nutrients and looking scummy.

Seedlings dropped into the contraption.

Two weeks later.

That is two beefsteak style tomato plants, one roma and one yellow pear salad tomato; one cuke vine and two varieties of melon.''

They outgrew the area the 400W HID could illuminate three weeks ago. Since, they've been splayed out on the floor waiting for me to give them some more space under a 600W. The roots are staying healthy, I think they'll pick right up from where they left off.

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Comments (8)

plantboy_grower
18 years ago
Wow, thanks for sharing!

My only comment is, I'll bet it's hard to change the system once it's time to change the water... b/c the reservoir won't surely hold all of the water in the system, so you have to mix in the buckets as well as the reservoir, then, you have to somehow pump out the reservior and buckets, or dissasemble the buckets, in order to change the water or clean the system. How do you plan on performing this maintenance?
shockingelk
Original Author
18 years ago
Yes, it would be an improvement if I could completely drain from the bottom of each bucket into a controller and down a drain.

For now, I have an extra bucket I can rest each net pot in one by one while I dump the bucket.
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charlielittle
18 years ago
I see your system is elevated so maybe you could rig a drain line between buckets right at the bottom edge of each. The last bucket drain come out to a valve to open and drain all of them at once without moving the net pots. Come up the outside of last bucket before the final drain with a piece of clear tubing that's open to the air and it will serve as a visual water level indicator for all the buckets since the drain line will have them all connected and gravity will keep the water level same in each. Fantastic job...I love it!
grizzman
18 years ago
Nice looking setup. What is the sq ft of floor space? (for the 400W MH)
Also, is the lava rock sitting in 6" net pots cut into the bucket lids?
My only comment, and it stems from the same flaw as the drainage issue, is that the aerated water will not really aerate the entire volume of water in each bucket. since the 'in' line is at or above the out line, only a small depth of the volume will be aerated. Probably in the range of 1"=2" from the top.
You'd have been better off putting your drainage pipes at or near the bottom and setting the 'in' lines to dump the nutrient directly onto the media. Of course, then you system becomes essentially a modified NFT system. Not saying you won't have good results, just that your system requires a lot more nutrient than the plants need. if you inspect your pots in a few more weeks, you'll see the new 'alive' growth will be near the tops of the nutrient while what is near the bottom will be dying off.
sdrawkcab
18 years ago
impressive.

How low are the water return gromits, can you completely drain the system or do you just add water and adjust the nutirent levels?
shockingelk
Original Author
18 years ago
grizz -

Under the 400W MH (and later, HPS) they were in a cabinet with 12 square feet of floorspace.

The net pots with the lava rocks are 8".

The water in the buckets seems to get mixed up rather well despite the "out" tubes being at (and determining) the top of the water level.

I suppose I could have an "out spigot" near the bottom of the buckets and use the top to avoid overflow, but am unsure how I would make sure the water is coming in as fast or faster than the water going out the bottom.
tom100play_yahoo_com
15 years ago
very impressive system. I attended the Kush Con II event in Denver a couple weekends ago, and was impressed by the variety of systems there. The best seemed to be recirculating dwc systems not unlike yours. Are you planning to build another iteration of your system? after all, it seems like you've discovered the bugs in the original and it would be relatively easy to fix them.
halfway
15 years ago
Thanks for resurecting this Tom. Great thread I had not seen.